CBN News 2026-11-13 19:56:57 Listen to the news
Author: Chen Yangyuan Editor-in-Chief: Ning Jiayan
Opening the bestseller list of laptops on e-commerce platforms, computers priced under 5000 yuan are starting to disappear from the list.
On November 13th, the last day of Tmall's Double 11 shopping festival, reporters checked the best-selling list of laptops on Tmall and found that all of the top ten laptops had a price of over 5,000 yuan. The cheapest model, the Mechanical Revolution Boundless 15X Gaming Edition with 1TB storage and 16GB of memory, was on sale for 5,130 yuan. Among the top ten products on the list, 7 had a price of over 7,000 yuan, and 4 had a price of over 10,000 yuan.
The average online sales price of laptops has risen to 7,759 yuan in the third quarter. On November 11th, a report titled "Monthly Tracking of China's Laptop Retail Market" released by Lutu Technology showed that in the third quarter of 2026, the average sales price of laptops on major domestic e-commerce platforms was 7,759 yuan, an increase of 13.4% year-on-year.
Behind the continuously rising average selling price of computers is the impact of rising storage chip prices on the computer market. In July this year, Lenovo raised the prices of all its product categories uniformly, and major manufacturers such as HP, Dell, and ASUS also increased the prices of several popular laptops. Intel estimates that this round of price hikes, which began in the fourth quarter of 2025, will last at least until the first half of 2027.
Even during Double 11, consumers did not see the victory of the "wait-and-see" group, as the prices of many computer models on Double 11 were higher than those during 618. Taking the ASUS ROG Z7 Pro Core Edition 16-inch RTX5060 /5070 gaming laptop, which ranked first in the above list, as an example, data from the comparison shopping platform Manmanmai shows that during 618, the lowest price for this model was 8,549 yuan, while on November 11, the price reached 11,599 yuan, a difference of 3,050 yuan. Data from Dewu App also indicates that during Double 11, the average transaction prices of two popular gaming laptops, Lenovo Legion R7000P and MechRevolution Jiaolong 16Pro, increased by 2,369.6 yuan and 2,143.92 yuan respectively, with both increases being around 30%.
"The regular promotional efforts of the platform are insufficient to offset the rising rigid costs," analyzed Guo Tao, an angel investor and senior artificial intelligence expert, to a reporter from Yicai. He believes that as prices rise, the storage supply chain is undergoing structural reconfiguration. Storage manufacturers are prioritizing high-value-added wafer resources for HBM and server-grade storage, squeezing the supply of consumer-grade DRAM and NAND. Coupled with the reduction in capital expenditures during the previous low point of the storage cycle and the depletion of low-price inventory in channels, this has pushed up the material costs of PC systems. Although the price of graphics cards has recently declined, this is only a temporary market trend in the sub-sector of graphics cards and is not enough to offset the cost pressure imposed by storage chips on the overall system cost.
Price fluctuations can affect consumers' decisions to upgrade their devices. Guo Tao believes that continuous price changes disrupt consumers' inherent expectations of taking advantage of sales promotions to buy at low prices, and at the same time, there will be a general increase in cautiousness among consumers in the computer market. The demand for upgrades from non-essential needs will be postponed, putting significant pressure on the demand for basic-priced products. He suggests that in the face of such strong cost fluctuations, manufacturers need to abandon the past approach of relying solely on low-priced, high-volume products. Instead, they should refine their product portfolio by stratifying it, carefully control the large storage configurations of entry-level models to manage material consumption, and focus on refining the AI PC product line. The industry's focus should gradually shift from the difference in hardware prices to AI value-added services that integrate software and hardware.
Lutu Technology data shows that in the third quarter of 2026, the sales volume of laptops in the Chinese market across all online channels reached 3.12 million units, a year-on-year decrease of 14.0%; the sales amount was 24.1 billion yuan, a year-on-year decline of 2.6%. Market sales have been on the decline for the fourth consecutive quarter since the fourth quarter of 2025.
"Until the supply and demand squeeze on memory chips is alleviated, it will be difficult for laptop prices to see a downward turn in the short term. However, I believe the most steep period of price increases has already passed," judged Zhang Yi, CEO, Chief Analyst at iiMedia Research Group. The negative feedback from declining sales volumes is expected to curb the wave of price hikes in the computer market. For manufacturers, the real challenge lies in how to prevent the transmission of supply chain costs from leading to a reduction in product value."
